Personally, I think that Mei and Reaper fulfill their niche roles currently. Just because a hero isn’t “meta,” doesn’t mean that they aren’t viable.
Bastion however… is Bastion. Outside of team comps like Pirate Ship and mowing down an unaware enemy team in Overtime, the hero is practically worthless because of one reason that surprisingly Zarya also suffers from. They need constant protection of a BARRIER.
Why do you think Rein/Zarya (or dare I say Orisa/Zarya) comps and Bastion/Rein or Bastion/Orisa comps are so common for tank lineups that utilize these two heroes?
These heroes cannot physically function by themselves very well in 1v1 scenarios without the input of an ally’s participation (0 self-sustain outside of her relatively long cooldown personal barrier). For Zarya, the charge she gains off players shooting at her deployed barriers on Reinhardt and his barrier; and for Bastion, the wall of damage negation that sustained barriers provide, allowing him to mow down those within LoS without immediately being focused down.
Personally, the fact that Bastion CAN be so impactful is where the hero’s flaws begin to show. You can’t have a hero that can kill an enemy team in 3 seconds (not actual time, guesstimating for the sake of not doing the ****ing calculations), okay? You just can’t; it’s overpowered as all get out, right? And you know, they tried to balance it out with Ironclad forever ago, so props to them for that because it was a genuinely good idea. A trade-off of Insane headshot damage for better sustain. Seems fair, better than before actually. However, this ultimately backfired and Ironclad was nerfed, leaving Bastion where the hero is now with minor tweaks over the last few years that hardly impacted the hero in any significant way at all. Bringing this back a bit-since I sort of went off the rails explaining outdated balancing changes-Bastion has a number of flaws outlined by the hero’s Reconfiguration: Sentry Ability. This ability that transforms Bastion into a literal turret sounds great on paper, but awful in reality. This is a relatively fast-paced FPS game with some MMO (and other game archetype) elements implemented. You can’t afford to be sitting in a fixed position doing nothing (something that Builders like Torb/Sym suffer from aside from low-impact in team fights). I mean, for ****s sake… The game literally has a mid-game tip that says that you should constantly be moving in-game (and yes, those tips are very outdated, but frankly this particular one is still current despite this fact).
So, what’s to be done then? Well, I see two options, either Reconfiguration: Sentry simply needs to be reworked ENTIRELY or Bastion needs a complete overhaul of changes to stay current in developing metas.
I like the idea of the lowered reload time, but I believe that the other changes would not fix his fundamental problems, but rather completely ignore them and create certain parts of his kit to be overpowered. This is personally what I would like to see:
Configuration: Recon
Reload time reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds
Reconfigure
Cast time (into Configuration: Sentry) reduced from 1 second to 0.8 seconds
Cast time (into Configuration: Recon) reduced from 0.5 seconds to 0.4 seconds
Configuration: Tank
Can now move during cast while in Configuration: Recon
This is pretty nice as buff, but it should be implemented only if necessary. I’m more for a cooldown reduction, or for a refund if cryofreeze is not used completely
I agree with the part saying that Bastion shouldn’t sit in Sentry all the time, but not with your method of achieving it. If Sentry were to be removed or significantly reworked, then Bastion wouldn’t be Bastion anymore. Bastion’s entire kit revolves around his minigun, and it needs to stay that way, or else he just becomes a bad off-brand Soldier.
While I think that attempting to rebalance Bastion was a good idea, I don’t think they went about it in the right way. At the time, damage resist was rather new to the game, only Ana had an ability that could apply it, so it’s effects weren’t extremely obvious. Giving Bastion a passive damage resistance seemed fine at the time perhaps, but it turned to be far too hard to balance around. They need to take away his passive damage resistance all together and either remove Ironclad completely or change it into something else. My favorite idea for it would be to allow Bastion (and only Bastion) to overheal himself with 75 armor when at full health. The armor doesn’t go away over time (only with damage), and can’t be healed by healers. This armor also applies to Recon mode. With this version of Ironclad, Bastion isn’t actively encouraged to stay in Sentry mode all the time for the damage resist, and it encourages the player to move around because going to Recon mode doesn’t remove the effects of Ironclad anymore, making escape a valid option.
His Sentry gun also needs some tweaks. His spread is far too inconsistent. They wanted to lower his effective DPS against squishies, but they also made it nearly impossible to kill tanks as well. They tried to make him a “shield breaker”, but this is a needless role, as pretty much anyone else in the game can fill this role while staying safer than Bastion (since Bastion has to set up into Sentry mode to shoot the barriers, whereas other heroes can corner peek). If they wanted to reduce his damage against squishies, they should have just reduced his base damage and given him a bonus to his barrier damage to keep him at 450 against them. With the new Torb rework, they’ve shown that they’re not scared to give bonus damage to specific health types, why not do that to Bastion? He wouldn’t kill as quickly, but his damage would still be consistent, which makes up for it. I don’t mind needing to track someone for an extra half second or so, but it’s very frustrating to track someone for 2-3 seconds, and they only lose half of their health because only a third of my bullets hit due to the spread.
Recon mode: able to use Self-Repair while using primary fire
Sentry mode: reduce spread by 20%, return crits
Tank Mode: give +50 armor
Mei: reload in full use of Cryo Freeze
Reduce ult animation by .5s
Change slows to also reduce vertical movement as well.
Reaper:
Reduce Shadowstep beginning and ending animations by .5s
New alt-fire: Grenade Launcher has 2 types of ammo selectable by mouse wheel
Hellfire Grenades: 3 rapid fire projectiles 50 damage direct impact, 25 damage explosion in. 5’ radius +50% damage to armor
Nightfall Grenades: 3 rapid fire projectiles explores when hitting the ground into 5’ Radius cloud of black smoke. Allows Reaper and his team to see outlines of inobscured enemies while Reaper and his team are not visible. Lasts 10s.
After using his Grenade Launcher, it goes into a 15s cool down and Reaper automatically switches to his Hellfire Shotguns.
Tank on E is another somewhat popular rework idea… they’ve given a bunch of other heroes their ult on E, but it would actually make sense for Bastion… that rework still keeps/improves Sentry mode though… if you take away Sentry, then it’s simply not Bastion anymore. That’s like taking away Mercy’s staff…
Bastion is plenty mobile enough, especially after his transform time buffs. The issue is that currently, staying in Sentry is often encouraged over switching to Recon because of Ironclad, which shouldn’t be the case. Ironclad is the cause of pretty much all of Bastion’s issues. If they hadn’t made that ability, and just left Sentry as it was (or maybe reduced the damage or headshot multiplier slightly if they felt that he did too much, but I don’t think he did), then Bastion would be pretty much perfect. Probably still one of the lowest picked heroes in the game because people don’t like his playstyle, but that doesn’t really matter, what matters is that he’s actually good at his job. Some people do like his playstyle, and they’ll play him. Others will play other heroes.
He’s not designed to be fast, he needs to be slow to balance out his high (intended) damage much like most tanks (the ones with high damage anyway). What I meant was that he can swap between Recon and Sentry fast enough to make an escape most of the time, and he can also use his transform times on attack as well, though he’s not quite as good on attack on many maps. I like him on Kings Row and most payload map attack phases, but not on every map.
Which is what Blizz has been trying to reduce with reworks. Making heroes viable in [most] every situation on every map.
Also, your argument for why Bastion is so slow is because he can output so much damage compared to any other hero. Perhaps what he needs is faster configurations. I mean, think about it. In meta where burst damage is prominent, and mobility is a key factor in survivability, wouldn’t it be beneficial for the hero to be able to-if not move faster-be able to get out of stationary configurations faster?
I mean, he only takes 0.5 seconds as it is to leave Sentry… The only thing that really kills me because I was stuck in Sentry is either the entire enemy team, or a dragonstrike that spawns right on top of me. I don’t think they should try to fit Bastion into a meta, I think making him playable on his own would be the best course of action. It sounds kinda bad, but I wouldn’t be upset if he were to stay in F tier forever, so long as he’s there because people don’t like his playstyle, and not that he’s bad at his job. Trying to fit him into a meta, or balancing him to fight a meta is probably a bad move, because as soon as that meta dies, he’s right back to being useless (this is what happened with the “shield buster Bastion”, only he went from useless to slightly more useless).
As long as his Sentry mode is consistent again (and not like some cooldown ability or something. Or God forbid, his ult…), I’d probably be happy.
A common tactic is to bunny hop away from Mei.
This could also affect Genji’s double jump, Pharah Jump Jets, Hanzo’s lunge, and Junkrat’s mine jump. Though some of those would feel the affect less than others.
A 50% decrease in spread for Reaper’s primary fire is way too much.
They reduced the spread of Sombra’s Machine Pistol by just 10% a while ago, which made a huge difference, and you think that a reduction by 50% for Reaper would be a good idea?
Bastion’s tank mode doesn’t give him extra armor anymore… they took his 150 instant-applied armor, and replaced it with 75 effective health that’s applied after a 1.5 second transform time…
As for the overheat, I wouldn’t mind it, but how long is he allowed to fire for before he starts hurting himself?